Chapter four in Teaching online: A guide to theory research and practice by Claire Major discusses different tools that have been used for online learning and what makes them so effective. There are 5 courses discussed in this chapter about online course structures, and each course was presented to learners in a different way. Some instructors decide to create their own platforms for students to engage in and some chose to use already created, but personalizable, platforms for students to interact with materials and each other. To encourage students to communicate with one another and herself, Cris Crissman describes how she uses a virtual reality platform as a class meeting space. She states that using a tool like Second Life, “..asks for a suspension of disbelief, a willingness to be open to change, and a playful, creative spirit—all valuable attributes for a twenty-first-century teacher.” (Major, 2015).
Another teacher/course developer from chapter 4 discusses how he used social media as a springboard to develop his course and connect to the students. By looking at what he knew already and what he wanted to accomplish with his students, he decided to use the service Blogger to allow students the freedom to expand their learning through commenting on each others blog posts and creating posts that were relevant and important to them.
I really like the idea of using blogger as a facilitation tool in an online course because it really allows for students to be flexible in how they want to share themselves. Personally I have used Blogger a little and it was only written posts without minimal multimedia integration, but the program itself was straightforward and easy to master the basics. With more knowledge of what the program could do, you could have students share their learning through modes other than text; maybe integrate some personally created videos or audio recordings.
As most online learning communities and classes are made for the high school level or post secondary education and I am an elementary school teacher, I try to look at online learning through a different lense. One program that is becoming more and more popular in elementary and middle schools is Google Classroom. Because it works as a main hub for students to communicate with their teacher and peers, and share information and projects, I am wondering how well it works when compared with systems like Moodle. After reading this chapter, I have a good idea of what aspects need to be included for a successful online class and how creative you can get when facilitating online learning.
Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching online: A guide to theory, research, and practice. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press